Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

Death is the only real elegance.

Death. The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity- and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.

Life will go on - until it doesn't.

Death, which we are accustomed to consider an evil, really acts for us the friendliest part, and takes away the commonplace of existence.

Death may whiten in sun or out of it.

Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet!

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

That death was near, I suppose I believed, but I saw it only as a rest after the day's work.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.

Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it's what makes life interesting and suspenseful.

It is natural to die as to be born.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.

The sudden hand of Death close up mine eye!

Death's not a separation or alteration or parting; it's just a one-handled door.

Why do people want to pretend that death is sleep? It isn't. It isn't.

You realize that life is short and fragile; and when you are facing walls of water, you understand your own mortality can change and how quickly things could change.

The first thing I would like to tell you about death is that there is no bigger lie than death. And yet, death appears to be true. It not only appears to be true but also seems like the cardinal truth of life - it appears as if the whole of life is surrounded by death. Whether we forget about it, or become oblivious to it, everywhere death remains close to us. Death is even closer to us than our own shadow.

There are only two things to write about: life and death.

Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.

Death is one dream out of another flowing.

Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.

The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.

Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.